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User blog:Jonius7/Update 30 December - 1 Jan: Obsessive Stitching Disorder (Map Strain)
Ok, time for another update! I should have done this earlier, but really there was lots of time where I wasn't editing the wiki and busy with other things. Late on 29 December I decided to add a sort of image of the town map of Dejado, however I realised to my dismay that the current map image we have was quite blurry when zoomed in on a single town. On 30 December I played Survivalist again, decided to get as far as I could. I was rushing towards the end, sacrificing community members, but I finished the game! I now have access to cheats! So my motivation for finishing the game was being able to reveal the entire map. I could then zoom in as far as I could in game to get the most detailed map images. This would require a lot of screenshots though. I first tried stitching images in paint.NET, but each image required cropping out the game interface around it. So how could I do this to what I estimated to be at least 80 images without going insane manually doing it? In comes Photoshop, I used Photoshop to record an Action of cropping, then ran it for each of the screenshots I had taken so far. Hmm it seemed to work well, now how about stitching the images together? I guess there is a feature called Photomerge that does this automatically, it was worth a try. After letting it process for a few minutes on the top half of the map, I was intrigued by the results. I had a pretty seamless map that looked pretty good. Until I zoomed in that is. Parts of the images were clearly misaligned, there was a road on one of the screenshots that was clearly out of alignment (I later discovered why this was so). Looks like I had to stitch all the screenshots manually. There were a lot of weird things I had to do during the process of seamlessly stitching up the map, including: *Getting Steam to take uncompressed .png screenshots (default .jpg introduces some weird quality and colour loss) *shifting an image half a pixel because it didn't align to a single pixel *deleting/covering quest arrows *realising I had cropped 3 pixels off the edge of each screenshot *adding missing pixels to the edges and corners of the map *covering all the "Click or Drag" in-game dialogs by taking enough screenshots of the bottom edge *re-doing several crops of screenshots, without cutting off 3 pixels off the edge *filling in several thin gaps I had missed previously (this is why Photomerge didn't work properly) *re-deleting "shadows" of quest arrows because the Background Eraser tool was incompetent and I should have used Rectangle Select and deleted *Accounting for 2 different Photoshop versions (running Photoshop CC and Photoshop CS4) *more which I won't explain... I had to split this work up over a few days, across 2 computers. The result: a high-res (5391px x 5390px), full map of Survivalist that can be further used for maps of separate towns and areas. I used many different techniques to get as 'perfect' a map as possible, of course nothing is perfect, but it is as close as you can get it. If there's any more imperfections they'll be really small ones, ones that aren't visible unless you zoom in 400%+. The only other things I could do to increase the quality would be to retake all screenshots using a Full HD Monitor (which I have but not convenient to use), I would have to re-do the entire map again, but no I'm not ready to repeat that stuff, geez! If anyone can do a better job, I'd like to see them try. As for Wiki editing, I did make a whole bunch of edits on 31 December, made some new article pages. It is becoming more apparent to me just how much more articles we need to be filled in, and I don't think I have the expertise to write all of them. So I've called on the Steam Discussions for some help. There will be more to follow, but I think this is a longer term thing. EDIT: The blog title is a joke lol, I'm more perfectionist than anything OCD. Category:Blog posts